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To: TobagoJack who wrote (53076)	9/7/2004 10:55:28 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

I was expecting that: who's subsidizing whom situation. The article points to typical situation expected to happen when a state is returning to its natural size as the US has indeed doing for the past 32 years starting Aug. 1962 when Nixon stopped backing the USD by gold and forcing everyone else to revalue. When the going is good, i.e., economy is growing, there is a high degree of harmony in the land. Everyone is beautiful, hardworking, law abiding and a poster card for the rest of the world. They are sung in verse and prose and pat their back of how good they are. Kind like Germany and their "wirtschaftwunder". Then economic growth stops. But remember, Jay, that economic growth is a huge carpet. Under it a lot of not nice stuff is stuffed to avoid spoiling the harmony and the niceties of the country. Yes, you may be remebering the "Asian Values" of the early 90's pre-Asian meltdown. Then when the economy is visibly not going, as you notice by the governments window dressing job figures and Central Bankers talk using circumlocution; call it the "wirtschaft blunder" if you may, people have a nasty way to start counting the small change, and looking to the bills with a microscope and then they start spotting that, surreptitiously, some guys were picking their pockets and no one was talking about it. Then they start discovering that some people that they thought were richer because of working harder, were in fact, piggybacking the hardworking. As usual the knives come out.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (53076)	9/7/2004 7:43:43 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, that article is a sour-grapes rant by some has-been left-winger trying to stir up class warfare. Salaries are much higher on the coasts, so those folks are still paying plenty of federal taxes. And the feds have been raising the standard deduction lately, so the heartland folks are still getting a deduction even if they don't itemize.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (53076)	9/7/2004 10:26:57 PM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 74559

AMT, Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminates most of this tax advantage for huge numbers of people. The political active people in the fly-over states (meaning the ones that donate money, even a few 100 USD) live in houses ususally worth over $300 K (say twice median), so they frequently see some deduction benefit. School teachers are about the only fudners of the Democrates that might want to eliminate the mortgage interst deduction. It sure want be trial lawyers. ALso, if that deduction is eliminated, the mortgae default rate would go up, endangering FannieMae and FreddieMac, and Wall Street and the FED would hate that. Now the AMT recaptures most of the lost revenue, so there would not be all that much to gain.